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WhatsApp Explorer: A Data Donation Tool To Facilitate Research on WhatsApp

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arxiv 2404.01328 v1 pith:AJHK5LNG submitted 2024-03-29 cs.SI cs.CY

classification cs.SIcs.CY
keywords whatsappdataresearchtoolcollectionexplorerscaleabundance
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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In recent years, reports and anecdotal evidence pointing at the role of WhatsApp in a variety of events, ranging from elections to collective violence, have emerged. While academic research should examine the validity of these claims, obtaining WhatsApp data for research is notably challenging, contrasting with the relative abundance of data from platforms like Facebook and Twitter, where user "information diets" have been extensively studied. This lack of data is particularly problematic since misinformation and hate speech are major concerns in the set of Global South countries in which WhatsApp dominates the market for messaging. To help make research on these questions, and more generally research on WhatsApp, possible, this paper introduces WhatsApp Explorer, a tool designed to enable WhatsApp data collection on a large scale. We discuss protocols for data collection, including potential sampling approaches, and explain why our tool (and adjoining protocol) arguably allow researchers to collect WhatsApp data in an ethical and legal manner, at scale.

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Cited by 1 Pith paper

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  1. Synopsis: Secure and private trend inference from encrypted semantic embeddings

    cs.CR 2025-05 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    A system combining local and central differential privacy with malicious-secure MPC lets journalists query semantic embeddings of donated E2EE messages without accessing the underlying texts.

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